Jean Baptiste Beaubien (September 5, 1787 - January 5, 1864),See note on talk page re various dates. was an American multi-lingual fur-trader, soldier, and politician. He was born in Detroit, Northwest Territory under British occupation, and became an early resident of what would become Chicago, Illinois. He was also as an early civic and militia leader in Cook County, Illinois during the Black Hawk War, before moving to Du Page County, Illinois in his final years.Ann Durkin Keating, Rising Up from Indian County: the Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago (University of Chicago Press 2012) pp. 67-68
Early and family life Jean Baptiste Beaubien was born in Detroit to the former Marie-Josephette Douaire De Bondy, and her husband, Joseph Cuillerier Beaubien, of a prominent local French-Canadian family. The couple had 10 children, and his father also had 15 children from a prior marriage.Ulrich Danckers, Jane Meredith et al., Early Chicago (Inland Press, River Forest Illinois, 2000) p. 68 His younger brother Mark Beaubien would also move to Chicago in 1826 and achieve some prominence for his Sauganash Hotel.Early Chicago Unlike his friend and competitor, John Kinzie, Beaubien does not appear to have owned slaves, but he did employ free persons of color in 1830.1830 U.S. Federal Census for Peoria, Putnam County, Illinois (pp. 5 and 6 of 10)
Jean Beaubien married four times, beginning in 1804. He survived three wives and possibly sired as many as 20 children. His first wife, as with many traders of the era, was a Native American woman, whose name no longer survives, only that she died giving birth to their daughter Marie.Keating p. 67 Beaubien married his second wife, Mah-naw-bun-no-quah, also of the Odawa people in 1807; her father (or brother) Shabbona was Odawa and had married a Potawatomi woman from a village southwest of what became Chicago in Beaubien's lifetime. Their first son, Charles Henry Beaubien (1807-1858) was born in Chicago, and their second son Madore Beaubien (1809-1883) was born at the Grand River, Michigan trading post but would live in Chicago most of his life. In March 1812 the widower wed Josette LaFramboise (1796-1845), whose family had moved to Chicago from Milwaukee, although they wed on Mackinac Island at the other end of Lake Michigan. Beaubien married New Yorker Louise Pinion in 1855, who would survive him.Her surname is transcribed "Pennean" on the typed Cook County marriage/death records online, and "Penney" on earlychicago.com. They had a son and two daughters.
Career
Beaubien learned the fur trading business from Joseph Bailly, who had a trading post on the Grand River in modern-day Michigan. Bailly provided Beaubien with a basic education, as he did with his metis trainee, Alexander Robinson, although unlike Beaubien Robinson never learned to write any European language (but used his own script to keep track of his accounts). By 1800, Beaubien had his own trading house in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. By 1806, Bailly and Robinson had a trading post in the Lake Calumet region (now part of Chicago).
Fort Dearborn
Beaubien first visited Fort Dearborn, which later became the heart of downtown Chicago, shortly after its construction in 1804, but did not buy property there until 1812. In April 1812, he left with his new wife Josette La Framboise and her metis family, all of whom returned to Milwaukee after unfriendly Winnebago killed and scalped several Caucasian settlers on an outlying farm, in what turned out to be a prelude of the Fort Dearborn Massacre of August 15, 1812.Keating p. 100, 125-126 Fellow trader John Kinzie, a friend of the fort's commander Nathan Heald, moved his family into the fort, and in early August warned Heald against obeying an evacuation order after the War of 1812 began; Heald's disregard of that advice and compliance with the order to move to Fort Wayne led to the massacre. Meanwhile, in June, Kinzie had killed interpreter Jean LaLime who was a member of a rival faction within the fort, and fled to Milwaukee, where he was greeted with suspicion and found those Indians both anti-American and planning to join western Indians under the direction of British trader Robert Dickson at Green Bay and war against the Americans. After returning to Chicago and failing to convince commander Heald to stay in the fort, Kinzie ultimately enlisted fellow trader Alexander Robinson, who eventually managed to evacuate some survivors to Grand River and Detroit.
Beaubien, Robinson and Bailly continued to trade during the conflict, supplied by Dickson rather than his American competitors.However, "Jean B. Beaubien" is listed as a sergeant in 1 Reg't (Godfroy's) Michigan Militia during the War of 1812 according to a text-only collection on ancestry.com In January 1814, an American expedition led by Robert Forsyth (John Kinzie's half-brother) captured Bailly and three other traders at St. Joseph. John Kinzie then traveled to St. Joseph, where he convinced several native American leaders to travel to Greenville, Ohio to attend an American peace conference which led to the Treaty of Greenville (1814), although other Native leaders (particularly Main Poc refused)Keating pp. 191-192
Chicago founder
When the U.S. Army returned to rebuild Ft. Dearborn in 1816, Beaubien also returned to Chicago. By 1818 he was an agent of the American Fur Company, usurping Kinzie's former position. However, he continued to cooperate with Kinzie on other business ventures, and Kinzie's Virginia-raised son (by his first wife), James Kinzie, would operate trading posts at Milwaukee and Racine for the American Fur Company). Beaubien purchased a house or cabin south of the Fort Dearborn ruins, which he transformed into a barn in 1817 after erecting a new residence and small trading post.Keating pp. 215, 218-219History of Early Chicago p.
Beaubien continued to travel, trading at Milwaukee and Green Bay, Wisconsin, but thereafter always returned to his Chicago base. By 1822, John Crafts (the former trader for the Conant & Mack company of Detroit), became the American Fur Company's chief trader in Chicago, and Beaubien as well as Kinzie worked for him as sub-agents. After the U.S. Government ended its factor system for trading with the Indians, Beaubien would acquire the former U.S. Factorhouse, originally a part of the second Fort Dearborn, from the American Fur Company in 1823 for $500. In the first Chicago tax roll, in 1825, Beaubien was the town's wealthiest man, with property valued at $1000. He hosted the first town election in 1825 as well as the first general election in 1826.Keating p. 226 However, as the American Fur Company grew into a monopoly in Chicago, the fur trade went into a decline, as local supplies of fur-bearing animals became exhausted soon after invention of the steel trap. Instead, traders soon received much of the annuity money distributed to cooperating Potawatomis and others pursuant to various treaties, liquor sales became very important, and the American Fur Company received reimbursement for much scrip its agents received from natives. Although Crafts died of malaria in Chicago in 1825, Beaubien and Kinzie (while feuding) continued until 1828. Then, the animal decline, as well as an influx of white settlers into the ceded Potawatomi lands caused American Fur Company operations in the Chicago Region to end abruptly(around the time John Kinzie died of a stroke in January 1828).Keating p. 220
Prominent citizen and officer
However, Beaubien refused to leave Chicago as Indian Country vanished. He had recruited a company of militia in 1827 in response to a scare about Winnebago attacks. The following year, the local court in Peoria appointed Beaubien administrator of John Kinzie's estate; in 1829 he became the public administrator of the estates of Francois La Framboise Jr., Indian agent Alexander Wolcott and others; Beaubien also was one of three local election judges in 1830. In 1829, surveyors for the Illinois and Michigan Canal were charged with platting towns on the route. During the winter of 1831–32, Beaubien became the president of the Chicago Debating Society. Of course, Beaubien (and his brother and sons) were among the "500 Chicagoans" found in the census that preceded formal incorporation of the Town of Chicago in 1833.
Meanwhile, the Sauk warrior Black Hawk gained support from remaining Potawatomis in northern Illinois and Wisconsin, including Billy Caldwell, displacing from power natives and metis whom Beaubien had long befriended, such as Alexander Robinson, Shabbona and Joseph La Framboise.Keating pp. 226-227 John Kinzie's half-brother, Thomas Forsyth, who had been the Indian agent for the Sauk and Meskwaki peoples in Western Illinois (and lived in St. Louis) was rather abruptly dismissed as part of a shake-up within the Andrew Jackson administration, leading to an U.S. Army intelligence failure as tensions worsened.
When the Black Hawk War broke out in 1832, Beaubien again raised a company of about twenty-five men and became their captain.An admittedly incomplete listing of Black Hawk War veterans in Illinois archives shows Beaubien's son, Madore Beaubien, serving as a lieutenant in Boardman's Company during that war, but does not show his father.https://www.ilsos.gov/isaveterans/blackHawkSearch.do The company worked alongside a group of Pottawatomie scouts, and the war proved short-lived. In the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, negotiated by Caldwell, Robinson and others who advocated compensated removal (particularly after the Indian Removal Act of 1830), Beaubien served as a witness. The Kinzie and Forsyth families received more than $50,000 (although John Kinzie had already died and Thomas Forsyth would die in 1833), the American Fur Company received $17,000 to cover Potawatomi debts, and individual traders also received compensation (Beaubien himself received either $250 or $3000 for debts under the treaty). In 1833, Beaubien ran to become one of the new town's trustees, but lost. The following year, he won election as the first colonel of the Cook County militia (it later became the 60th Illinois Militia Regiment). He also donated two lots on which were built St. Mary's Catholic Church, the city's first.Carl B. Roden, "The Beaubien Claim", Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society Vol. 42, No. 2 (Jun., 1949), pp. 150-154, 162
Beaubien land claim litigation In 1835, during a real estate boom and after Robert A. Kinzie (the trader's son) had success claiming a different downtown tract, Beaubien seemingly purchased the site of Fort Dearborn (75.69 acres) through the local government land agent for $94.61, although his two previous attempts had received letters of rejection on the grounds that it was a military reservation.Roden, pp. 155-156Andreas p.85 Unlike his purchase of the first carriage in town, or the second piano (for his daughters' use), this led to litigation, specifically his downstate lawyer's attempt to evict the fort's commandant, Major Lafayette Wilcox.John Jackson ex dem. Murray McConnell v. Lafayette Wilcox, 2 Ill. 344 (1836) (McConnell was Beaubien's lessee, and had subleased it to Jackson)